I don't know if this is a case of fair or unfair, so much as there is a lot of potential value that isn't captured by YouTube ads, which the creators would be silly to leave on the table, but which Google has not historically been positioned to capture. The ability to join channels is an attempt to make inroads on that value, but it seems like it will take some doing before that vehicle catches up to Patreon if it ever does.

This video from Veritasium goes into more about Youtuber burnout, self-blame, dynamics and the drive to non-platform revenue streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8

If you find the apparent contradiction between Youtube success and creators needing to built out non-platform revenue streams strange, the video gives a pretty good theory explaining why.

It's possible that a small number of creators are taking most of the revenue at any particular time, and the set of outstandingly successful creators keeps changing, which it might due to the promotion algorithm.

That gives all of them reasons to build out non-platform revenue streams.

I'm not saying Google/YouTube aren't taking too much. But hypothetically, even if they took 0% cut, the above could still happen.

Youtube makes money from ads, unlike other video communities like onlyfans , so most likely the cut that creators take doesn't cut it. Currently it seems creators use it as a social tool to raise awareness of their moneymaking product , but that leads to more and more videos being ads themselves, which is leads to google's recurring issue: spam.

If youtube made money from subscriptions the interests of youtube and creators would align better. As it is now it's on a spiral of more and more spam and self-reference which will eventually turn it to a ghost town (because unlike google search, all the video content is in their platform)

Isn't it simply that there's a lot less revenue coming in to YouTube? Most users aren't paying any monthly subscription, and the global audience is probably much less valuable to advertisers (on average) than e.g. a US cable TV audience.

Anyone can be a creator. You have to be pulling in millions of views from people that are valuable to advertise to (not all views are created equally) in order to make a career out of it.

And even then it's flash-in-a-pan stuff for the most part. My YouTube viewing very often consists of getting interested in a creator, watching a lot of their stuff for a while, slowly getting bored as it gets repetitive, then moving on. This happens sometimes in weeks, sometimes in months, sometimes in only days. There's nobody I watch year after year.

Another possibility you didn't mention is that many creators aren't creating as much value as they think they're worth.